Playing Quicktime 6 Movies using Mplayer :
No sound or video when playing Quicktime movies? Then this is how you check what codecs you need and how to install then. First you need to find the "Fourcc" value of the audio and video parts of the movie :

1] The Simple Install (just for Quicktime movies):
1.1) Install faad2 for aac mpeg audio support. (Faad2 has been recently added to portage although it is still masked):

Code:

emerge sync
emerge -u faad2

1.2) Once you have that installed, install the lastest mplayer (0.90). However i would also install other packages aswell
like mad/xvid and win32codec etc..:

Code:

emerge win32codecs mplayer

And now you can play your favourite quicktime movie files.

PS : Xine can also play Quicktime movies because it has a version of faad2 packaged within it.

2] Complete mplayer install (to be completed):
Mplayer uses a lot of other codecs to play stuff. So to make the most of mplayer here is some useful codecs to install :

Video Drivers :
If you have a nvidia card some of these drivers will not work properly. This is coz of the closed drivers that Nvidia supply.At the
moment the best vider driver for Nvidia cards is the XV or the SDL driver. Here is how to set the driver to be xv:

Code:

mplayer -vo xv movie.avi

or you can set is as the default in /etc/mplayer.conf or for a local user in ~/.mplayer/config :

XV :
This driver works on most computers and offers very good performance.

SDL :
The SDL driver is very good and can use XV/X11 and fb drivers depending on the situation.

X11 :
This driver is not as fast as the XV driver and does not support dynamic scaling.
You only need X to installed to use this one. This driver can be used by most cards and it the most stable.
Rather use the xv/sdl or vidix as they perform alot better.

AA :
This uses asci to print you movie to the console window. Don't really know why you would want this
other than it looks cool

GGI :
Fast and safe graphics and drivers for about any graphics card to the Linux kernel (sometimes). Does not seem to
work to well with Nvidia cards.

VIDIX :
VIDIX is the abbreviation for VIDeo Interface for *niX. It was designed and introduced as an interface for fast user-space
drivers providing such video performance as mga_vid does for Matrox cards. It's also very portable.

MGA_VID :
Ideal for Matrox cards.This section is about the Matrox G200/G400/G450/G550 BES (Back-End Scaler) support,
the mga_vid kernel driver. It's actively developed by A'rpi, and it has hardware VSYNC support with
triple buffering. It works on both framebuffer console and under X.

DirectFD :
A framebuffer driver which performs alot better than the fbdev.

Audio Drivers :
For more info on soundcards and mplayer go here for info on which driver to use.

SDL :
You need to install SDL. If you have arts runnig or are using either alsa or oss drivers it autodetects it and uses what is avaiable.
If you have any performance problems and have tried with the different video drivers it is advisable to try the SDL drivers.

OSS :
These are the old soundcard drivers that come with the 2.4 kernel. This will sound be depricated in the kernel and be replaced by the
newer ALSA drivers.

ARTS :
Kde Sound Server. Not really idea for playing movies. But it works .. kinda.

ALSA :
This is going to replace OSS in the kernel, however some older cards are still only support by OSS drivers. If this driver does for
work well, then use the OSS driver.

Codecs :
Here is how to get a list of audio codecs installed :

Code:

mplayer -ac help
mplayer -vc help

Realplayer :
Using mplayer as a realplayer replacement for playing rtsp:// streams.

Code:

emerge realplayer realone live mplayer

You can use kmplayer/mplayerplug-in or plugger to play the rtsp:// streams in the web browser (Although Realone seems to be an
improvement to be an improvement over Realplayer8).

Playing OGMs :
OGM's stands for "OGG media streams". OGM's allow for multiple video/audio and subtiltes. It is a wonderfull format especially
for anime fans. If you want to create your own one get ogmtools.
emerge libvorbis libogg

XVID Playing :
If you want to use mencoder to create xvid mpeg4 then you need the xvid package. However you do not need the xvid codec for playing
xvid avis as mplayer comes with the ffmpeg codec which seems to do a better job. However if you do want to try out the xvid decoder for
xvid encoded movies you can with the -vc command:

Code:

emerge xvid

Xanim Codecs :
Mplayer also codecs the xanim codecs.

Code:

emerge xanim

AAC MPEG audio :]/i]
This is what some of the Quicktime movies use.

Code:

emerge faad2

[i]Mp3 playing and encoding :
From my experience the mad mp3 decoder performs the best. You can force the mad decoder with the
"-ac" command like so : mplayer -ac mad movie.avi.

Code:

emerge lame mad

Misc :[i]
Flaac Playback :

Code:

emerge flaac

B] Playing Qucktime Movie :

Most of the time Quicktime movies play fine on mplayer, however there is an exception or two.

This should print out something like this :
Audio stream: 47.888 kbit/s (5986 bps) size: 61160 bytes 10.217 secs
So the audio delay is "10.217" as mplayer does cannot yet play the first track and only the second (Hopefully
this will be sorted out soon). To play this Quicktime movie with the audio in sync run :

Code:

mplayer -delay -10.217 the_second_renaissance.mov

You can save yourself time by storing that value for the specific file like so :

Code:

echo "delay=-10.217" > ~/.mplayer/the_second_renaissance.mov .conf

Now the_second_renaissance.mov will use -delay -10.217 by default. You can specify any setting you want that has a
commandline in mplayer like this :

Ok so you want to play your favourite trailer or Apple.com or at Matrix.com, but you do not want to mission with reading the
html source to be able to see the trailers. So here are some browser plugins to help you get sorted :

Fine Tuning Mplayer Playback :
If you playback generate messages about your pc being too slow then you can try benchmark you playback with this command.
I will print information at the end. Now you can check what is using all the cpu time by switching the -vo and -ao options.
First try with null to see how much just decoding uses.

Once you have found the victim you can do some system tuning. However if it is the raw decoding there is not much you can do other then tweak you comps performance itself. Check if you have dma is set etc..

As you can see there is about a 12-15% difference between raw playback and displaying the movie.

TIP:
Try different -sws and -pp value. -pp 0 disables win32 posprocessing and -pp 6 will use alot more cpu.

Tips,Fixes and Bugs :

The mplayer gui right click does not work :
If when you right click on gmplayer and nothing appears then you probably have the "gtk2" build of gmplayer. To fix this build
mplayer without gtk2 support:

Code:

USE="-gtk2" emerge mplayer

I think that there might be something wrong with the gtk2 patch.

Howto force a single session only of mplayer :
You know that nice feature of xmms that always for only one instance. Well here is how you do it for divx/avi/svcds etc..

1)Xmms-mplayer :
Make avi/mpeg etc.. default to xmms and install then xmms-mplayer from
here.

And now when you click on movies it will run in the one instance of xmms only and therefore the one instance of mplayer.
Cool or what.

NOTE : Xmms-mplayer is still very much beta code BUT is it awsome . avi-xmms plugin could also work like this, but is does
not support as many file formats and does not have the performance of mplayer.

2) Kmplayer
Kmplayer should also be able to do the same with its dcop interface and when 0.7.4 comes out there will be some nice
lots of nice improvements. Here is how to use the dcop interface of kmplayer :

Code:

Thanks to the KMediaPlayer::Player interface, KMPlayer can be controlled by DCOP. Eg. to open a movie, run
dcop kmplayer-<pid> KMediaPlayer openURL <your movie file>

It should be easy for the author of kmplayer to mimic the behaviour of xmms where can force only one instance of kmplayer.

Kmplayer also allows for embedded playback inside of konqueror while file browsing.

Pornview
Pornview is a file explorer that plays movies in an embedded pane. The new beta version of Pornview uses mplayer or xine for playback.

NOTE : The mplayer command interface has a "run" function, which does not seem to be enabled as yet, this should could also
allow for the same kind of functionality.

So what is stopping you now :
Here is the end result. Although ideally you should use mplayer and not gmplayer.

Just wondering why -vo xv is recommended for Nvidia cards. I just use the default, I believe it is SDL, it seems to work fine. When I try -vo XV, if I make the video fullscreen, my mousecursor still shows up (Wierd) and when it's windowed, I can't move or resize the window!

Just wondering why -vo xv is recommended for Nvidia cards. I just use the default, I believe it is SDL, it seems to work fine. When I try -vo XV, if I make the video fullscreen, my mousecursor still shows up (Wierd) and when it's windowed, I can't move or resize the window!

Well the SDL driver also plays quite well. You can benchmark the drivers like this :

Wow this will really get my started. I made the switch from WinXP to Gentoo about a month ago and I've had to put my video coding passion aside for a during the switch. I have about 300 divx and xvid movies that i've encoded myself but having tried to watch any of them in Linux yet. Thanks._________________-SmokesLikeaPoet

The ones from the mplayer page which are installed with emerge win32codecs. Reading the ebuild and the changelog for the latest verison, it does download all the qt stuff, and it's in /usr/lib/win32 already.